I personally can't quite see why this is any better than SQL.

Call me crazy, but I rather like SQL - it's pretty clear given enough whitespace.
Aliases make selecting from multiple tables and/or subselects tidy too.

Vanilla SQL* is going to be more portable than DAL - learn SQL and you can use it from Perl, PHP, $fave_language, whereas DAL is only being to be useful with your module to hand.

You're not providing anything clever (i.e. database independent SQL).

It'd be really cool if DAL spat out SQL that attempted to do The Right Thing, depending on the database it's talking too.

Interesting idea, but I can't see any practical use for it.

Cheers.

BazB

* OK, I know that Oracle, MySQL, PostGreSQL etc all have their own specific SQL extensions/mutations.

Update:
When I use SQL, I tend to go totally overkill on the whitespace.
Taking your example SQL, I have to admit the way you've formatted it is pretty nasty.

I'd lay it out as follows:

SELECT w.id, w.definition
FROM words      w, 
     stock      s, 
     languages  l, 
     stockmatch m, 
     types      t
WHERE 
    s.word       = ? 
AND l.name       = ? 
AND s.languageID = l.id 
AND m.stockID    = s.id 
AND w.id         = m.wordID 
AND t.name       = ? 
AND w.typeID     = t.id;
[download]

I'd possibly group the where clauses together by table too, if it made it easier to figure out which tables/columns where being used without having to scan up and down the list.

You'd line everything up in Perl, why not do it in SQL?

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